The bunker and the camp: inside West Germany's nuclear tomb

摘要

Recent research has located the camp as the paradigmatic space that emerges when geopolitics and biopolitics intersect. In doing so, it has neglected another space that is indispensable for an understanding of the nexus of these two modalities of power: the nuclear bunker. This paper explores the West German government's now abandoned nuclear bunker in the Ahr valley. Constructed on the site of a subterranean World War 2 concentration camp, the bunker hosted a number of NATO exercises, which simulated nuclear war on German soil. Through an analysis of the site's military-strategic context and its technical and security features, the paper relates it to its predecessor-the camp-and uncovers a number of spatial overlaps and inversions between the two. Whilst similarly situated within a context of legal exceptionality, logistics, and total war, the concentrated and confined living space of the nuclear bunker turned the camp's logic of extermination inside out. The nuclear bunker was a concrete crypt in which sovereign power and total war sought to find eternal peace.